


Breaking Glass

by fluorescentgrey



Series: Moonage Daydream [4]
Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Rock Band, Glam Rock, M/M, Piano Sex, velvet goldmine au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-07
Updated: 2020-06-07
Packaged: 2021-03-03 21:28:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24592303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: "This had to be the end. Quite simply it could not go on like this." Francis gives James an ultimatum. It goes how you might expect.
Relationships: Captain Francis Crozier/Commander James Fitzjames
Series: Moonage Daydream [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1773430
Comments: 12
Kudos: 23





	Breaking Glass

**Author's Note:**

  * For [attheborder](https://archiveofourown.org/users/attheborder/gifts).



This had to be the end. Quite simply it could not go on like this. On the tube over, hungover as sin, every jostle around the old plague pits stirring up his headache like the witches in Macbeth, Francis tried to think of all he ways he might end the whole affair, only to be stymied by having to run off at St. John’s Wood and puke in the bin as a gaggle of churchbound hens looked on in abject horror. 

On the street it was cool, damp and breezy, thick fog, like the choleric miasmas of not-so-distant yore. London. How in hell had he gotten here? He was supposed to be a barrister, partner at a firm in Holborn, living with his prim wife and Eton-bound sons in a flat in Belgravia, fucking other men on the side. Now he was stuck in this hell-dream out of Dickens. He coughed, spit in the gutter. Walked on. It was all James’s fault. 

At the time, 1977, the stadium-filling, platinum-shifting, crotch-moistening glam rock megastar known to his biographers as James Fitzjames lived, because of course he did, on Abbey Road. He would be seen sometimes, dressed down in black velvet, on the St. John’s Wood high street or on the outskirts of the Regent’s Park, wandering like an exiled druid. The music-cum-gossip rags you could get for a quid out of colorful boxes around town or off the counter in record shops speculated that perhaps he was going goth. Unfortunately, Francis, as his manager, under contract with the record label, Discovery, that James’s music functionally kept afloat, was uniquely privy to his mercurial whims, and understood he was put out by his abandonment by his previous band, whom he had taken to calling ‘the mutineers.’ Adding insult to injury, just about every session man and woman remaining in London was adamantly refusing to work with him, mostly for good reason. He claimed to be struggling to write songs, but the neighbor had called Francis numerous times complaining about a piano being pounded next door at odd hours of the night, and about the prevalence of two rockstar trappings that had never been in short supply for James: cocaine and groupies. 

These were evil doldrums. Francis had seen them before. He was beginning to worry he might lose his job, because Franklin had had him in and said it wasn’t seemly, for a record label executive, being photographed coming out of those sorts of clubs, falling in the gutter drunk and such. The problem with drinking was that nothing fixed drinking except drinking. Being an alcoholic was a self-fulfilling prophesy. Being James Fitzjames’ manager was a worse one. Something was going to have to happen or it would all die here, or so Francis had reasoned, sitting at his kitchen table for the last three nights, drinking scotch, sleeping occasionally on his folded arms, or otherwise passing out and coming around, he could not quite be sure. Because nobody else was going to make sure that that something happened, because of hubris (Franklin) or nihilism (James), it was going to have to be himself. He couldn't be sure whether this courage was real or he’d drunk it, and as such he knew he had to do this quick, before he found out. 

James’s place on Abbey Road was concealed by a high gate and a tall hedge, but, mostly for unseemly reasons, Francis had a key, and let himself in. Evidence of decadence was scattered festively across the lawn, which was overgrown and unmaintained, green, bolted, deep and weedy, abutting vibrantly against the wild hedges. It was like James to have let everything go back to nature. The grass was arrayed with bottles, baggies, takeaway cartons, joint clips, cigarette butts, sleeping bodies. One of them was Edward Little, who Francis knew to be a talented session guitar player when not attempting to self-medicate his deep-seated psychological issues with heroin. Maybe that was why he was here: the guitar playing, or the dope. Francis went over and woke him up gently with a hand at his shoulder. It took an uncomfortably long time, such that Francis began to worry he might have to drag Little inside and put him under the cold shower. Finally, “Sir,” Little said, blinking the crust out of his eyes. 

“Morning, Ned. James here?” 

“I heard him playing piano,” Little said. “Are you well, sir?” 

“Me? Quite.” 

“Are you sure? You look like… a lost dog.” 

He was staring deeply into Francis’s very soul. “Right,” Francis said, standing. “Try not to go back to sleep.” 

This would have to be dealt with later. He would have to be taken home, if he had one these days, or else to the detox hospital they all used, over and over and over again, out in Crouch End. Probably they would all have to go there for a good long while, go through the whole song and dance for Franklin’s benefit, and then go right back to it as soon as they got out, like always. Franklin was always all on with this puritanical notion, you have to show the press you know you have a problem, or else nobody will ever give you any sympathy for it. But he paid their bills, so they couldn’t quite call him out on such obvious bullshit. 

Inside there were more sleeping people, some of them vaguely familiar from previous such instances, arrayed artfully in states of undress over James’s mismatched furniture, couches, sofas, ottomans, tables constellated with cocaine dust, a needle sticking straight into the wine-stained shag carpet. James was in the conservatory just beyond, sitting at the piano in his green dressing gown and not much else, approximating the wistful loop that undergirded Roxy Music’s “2 H.B.” His hair in its natural state made him look somewhat like a mad scientist. You could tell looking at him, sometimes, this being one of those times, that he came from class, and was a bastard. He had both such looks about him, class and bastardy, depending on how he turned his head, wore his hair, did up his face, dressed. He was delicate and savage in twain, and in his eye there was a great unfulfilled searching that he would not let you see unless you were in his trust, or he wanted you to believe you were in his trust, or he was on enough of the right drugs. Francis’s mind supplied the song’s lyrics: _here's looking at you, kid / hard to forget_ … 

“You’ve got to stop banging on that thing before nine in the morning,” Francis said in lieu of announcing himself. “You’ll be evicted.” 

James did not stop playing, a gesture Francis was too hungover to interpret. He didn’t even look up. “I own this place,” he said. 

“You don’t. Franklin does.” 

This made him look up. He turned to Francis with an expression of bereaved consternation. Either he hadn't slept in a handful of nights or he had not bothered to clean the eye makeup off his face the last time he had worn it. “Are you his enforcer?” 

“You know I am.” 

James closed the lid over the keys. “Are you here to admonish me?” 

“Christ, James, what do you think?” 

He got up and brushed past Francis with a whiff of mothballs and patchouli. He was never un-proud in how he carried his shoulders, but the dressing gown did not hide the bite mark on his chest just inside the collar. “Come,” he said. “Want some orange juice?” 

The thought turned Francis’s stomach. “James…” 

“Coffee?” 

“James, I haven’t got time for this.” 

He turned heel. His face was drawn and thin. Francis wondered if at least he was eating, if he wasn’t sleeping. “Hop to it, then,” he said. 

“It can’t go on like this,” Francis told him. God, he had meant to warm his way up to this but it couldn’t be helped. “Do you see yourself? It can’t be borne. I’ve come here to tell you enough. Somebody has to.” 

James stepped toward him, warily, like a stalking cat. “Are you leaving me too, then?” 

“No, god. No, never. Listen, I think we ought to just go check in up in Crouch End, all of us, and then — ” 

“Then what? What happens now?” 

“Make a new record,” Francis said, knowing it was all wishful thinking, “tour, stay clean — ”

“Tour? With who? With what band?” 

“We’ll get you a better one; we’re not looking far enough afield, Franklin says, I’ve got a train ticket up to Manchester this weekend to scout out — ”

“Manchester!” James pushed past him again and swooned artfully onto the piano stool. Dimly Francis wondered how the human body could stand so much at once. The hangover was being gradually pushed out to make way for the storming lust and rage; now, as often, with James, they came hand in hand, one after the other, like lightning and thunder. “Do you _hear_ yourself? I’m done for — ”

“James, no, you’re not — ” 

“I am, and I know it! Franklin knows it! I wonder when you’ll hammer it through your goddamn thick skull!” He wound both hands into his own hair and pulled, hard. “Will you let me have this, for the love of god! Must you take everything away from me? After all I have nothing else — you’ve seen to that!” 

Francis took a steadying breath. He had learned this from one of the counselors the last time in Crouch End. He crossed the room and closed the door, tightening and loosening fists, which was another self-soothing mechanism, or so the counselor had called it, this one stemming from his early childhood. When he turned again James had sat up straight as a ballet dancer on the piano stool, simmering for a row. 

You can’t give it to him, Francis thought, a note of clarity amid the fog, it’s what he wants. 

“I will not,” Francis said. “My job is to believe in you.” 

“Your job is to keep me productive, and pretty, and from killing myself,” James said, ticking them off on his fingers. “Don’t bloody kid yourself.” 

“Is that not love?” 

“You have a fucked idea of love,” James said, “we’ve discussed this.” It had not so much been a “discussion;” James had slapped him. “I don’t know what it is about you. Your childhood? You should’ve been born in another time. You can’t risk everything and nothing at the same time these days; you’ll be killed instantly.” 

“Write a bloody song about it then.” 

“I have. I’ve written hundreds.” 

“Then — ” 

“It’s not so simple,” said James. “If you weren’t so square I almost think you’d get it.” 

“But don’t you want more? More than this?” 

“I wanted to rule the world,” James said. He shrugged. “You can’t always get what you want.” 

Infuriatingly, he opened the lid of the piano and started picking out the chords that opened the song of the same title by the Rolling Stones. _I saw her today at the reception_ … it was so typically insouciant that Francis went to him and tried to close the lid again, but James stopped him with a firm hand at his wrist; he stood and made to slap Francis across the face again but Francis stopped that, also with a firm hand at his wrist, such that they had each other pinned like wrestlers, and he could feel James’s rapid pulse against his palm. As such, for the thousandth time, they embarked on the path of least resistance. Impassioned, punchy fucks in semipublic (wide windows, sleeping revelers) were not anathema to their repertoire, but Francis had never before ripped James’s dressing gown off (literally, it was torn) and fucked him on the piano, shocking out these protracted discordant sounds from the instrument and from deep in James’s chest, from his entire body, which was another instrument, practically the only instrument Francis could play, and even then only sometimes, all of it ringing its brutal, dire music in the little room. When at last James came with a melismatic cry, all over the keys — that would be an expensive clean-up job — and wilted like a flower, Francis lost himself in his body, lost everything, only the music with him, as it was always with him, as it haunted him in his very dreams, buoying him into this glorious, deep emptiness, in which there was no need for anything more, no more striving that needed to be done, only a purity of feeling and sound which brought tears of joy to his eyes. 

When he came back to himself, James was wiping the come off the piano with his dressing gown. Francis wanted to lie down on the floor and make James sit on his face, but he could barely summon the wherewithal to take the condom off and throw it vaguely in the direction of the open window. He buttoned himself up as James sat next to him, naked, glorious, and started from where he had left off: 

_You can’t always get what you want  
_ _But if you try sometimes_  
_You just might find  
_ _You get what you need…_

_\---_

_\--_

_-_

**Author's Note:**

> this glam rock AU is a joint production of myself and chloe aka [reserve](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reserve). and i must confess that "stadium-filling, platinum-shifting, crotch-moistening" comes verbatim from [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xU2wLvzXLbk). 
> 
> this piece was written for [allegra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/attheborder) and an anonymous donor in grateful acknowledgement of their donations to organizations on the front line of the racial justice movement right now. i'm doing an [ongoing fundraising drive](https://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/post/620033047264378880/ok-everybody-i-hope-youve-seen-my-post-from-last) to support racial justice organizations and protestors - if you'd like to take part, and i hope you will, please give and message me with proof (on tumblr or at fgreyfx @ gmail) and i will write you something.


End file.
